Wyndham Lewis - The Enemy Speaks

A CD audiobook of readings by Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), the influential British modernist writer, artist and self-styled 'Enemy' feted both by T.S. Eliot and Mark E. Smith.

Lewis is best known as the founder of the Vorticist art movement, an English variant of Italian Futurism. Publication of their journal Blast was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, after which Lewis the artist pursued a parallel career as a writer of fiction, satire and criticism.

The Enemy Speaks gathers together rare broadcast recordings made by Lewis in 1938, 1947 and 1951 on various subjects in art and politics, as well as readings of three poems from One-Way Song recorded at Harvard in 1940. The CD also features a dramatized extract from his Bloomsbury-baiting satire The Apes of God, recorded in 1951 with an introduction by the critic V.S. Pritchett. The CD closes with the recording of Sympathy which so vexed Lieutenant Lewis in a shared dug-out near Ypres in 1917.

CD booklet features archive Lewis images and historical notes by James Hayward. Project released in association with the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

CD tracklist:

1. When John Bull Laughs (1938)
2. End of Enemy Interlude (1940)
3. Song of the Militant Romance (1940)
4. If So the Man You Are (1940)
5. A Crisis of Thought (1947)
6. The Essential Purposes of Art (1951)
7. The Apes of God (extract) (1951)
8. Sympathy (sung by Nelson & Leigh) (1917)